


Detorquere et Intervertere

by agoldenblackbird (mass_hipgnosis)



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Everyone Has Issues, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kinda?, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Murder, Sibling Incest, The Author Regrets Everything, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, really it's just mostly don and charlie being completely codependent and weird about each other, somehow still a happy ending?, the tagging on this might be overly cautious, unhealthy everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 02:20:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11476551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mass_hipgnosis/pseuds/agoldenblackbird
Summary: Numb3rsas seen through a funhouse mirror, in a world where Charlie was a little more different, Don a little less distant, and Margaret died twenty years too early.





	Detorquere et Intervertere

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Woman Waits for Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/62839) by [ladygray99](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygray99/pseuds/ladygray99). 



> THIS IS DARK AND TWISTED AND I WILL WARP YOUR FRAGILE LITTLE MIND. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

* * *

Megan knows that Don Eppes spent four years in Fugitive Recovery and had the highest success rate in the division, got an offer to be a tactics instructor at Quantico and turned it down, got an offer to lead Violent Crimes in Miami and turned it down, got an offer for this team _(her_ new team) after Kilcher was killed and said, "Nah," with a shrug and coffee-brown eyes already dismissing the offer, looking ahead to the next crime next case next _stalk-hunt-capture;_ something far more powerful and enticing than advancement. 

She doesn't understand him. He is a driven and highly skilled agent with no career ambition; an attractive man with a healthy appreciation for women who still lives at home and has never, so far as she can tell, had a long-term relationship. He is a loner with people skills; he presents a facade of open amiability and yet Megan does not know one personal fact about him that wasn't in his file. Don is an enigma. And there is nothing more intriguing to a profiler than a tough nut to crack. 

And Charlie...well, if Don is an enigma, Professor Charles Edward Eppes is the Nazca fucking Lines dipped in a Delphic Oracle riddle, rolled in mystery sprinkles, and gift-wrapped in P vs. NP. He is enough to make her believe in aliens; whatever looks at her from behind those chocolate-brown puppy eyes is nothing that will ever understand her or be understood; unless she acquires about twenty more I.Q. points and two or three math degrees, or has Don around to translate from Charlie to English. 

Her first day running the team (and she doesn't know whose brilliant idea it was, shipping her from Chicago to L.A. and putting her in charge instead of promoting from within, but Kilcher and Fisk are dead and Eppes said no and Granger all but has Property of U.S. Army stamped on his ass and Sinclair's been out of Quantico for less than a year, still has that new car smell, so who else was there?) she understands that she's not going to be in charge in L.A., not really; she'll sign the paperwork and get the credit from the Bureau and the press, or the blame if it comes to that. She'll weave psychological motivation and profiles and educated guesses into the reports, make it look good. 

But the packleader is a twenty-eight-year-old math professor with security clearance higher than God who wears a Glock 17 at the small of his back with as much ease as worn jeans and Converse sneakers and the white slice of an old knife scar on his throat, and transforms a scattering of facts and evidence into answers through some numerical alchemy that none of them understand. 

When Charlie takes five spree killings and one shaky eyewitness report with half a license plate and gives them an address, Megan is sure the information isn't worth the paper it's printed on. But clearly her team are all devout members of the First Church Of Charlie, and she has no choice but to smile and pretend to sip the Kool-Aid. 

Three cases later, she starts making discreet inquiries into the how and why of the L.A. Field Office acquiring a tame genius who runs the team with an iron fist and doesn't bother with the velvet glove, and what exactly Charlie has done to earn the slew of three-letter-agency holographic seals on his security badge. She gets a phone call from an NSA agent high enough up the federal ladder to squash her like a bug. He has a voice like winter frost, and when he's finished talking to her she has to go stand out in the 102 degree heat for ten minutes before the ball of ice in her stomach melts, and she knows she won't be asking any more questions. Not out loud, anyway. 

Charlie is not an agent. Megan has been to his office at CalSci and made excruciating small-talk with his pretty and clueless TA. But despite his class schedule and civilian status, whenever there could be real danger for Don, Charlie is right there beside him kicking in the door, the two of them moving together like the smooth revolution of a bullet chambering, precise and lethal, no words necessary. 

Megan is just grateful they're on the side of the angels; it's no exaggeration to say that they'd never catch the brothers Eppes. 

* * *

Charlie always burns two clips with his left hand for every one with his right, every time they go to the range. It started out as compensation for his non-dominant hand, but now it's gotten to the point where he's actually better with his left hand, which comes in fucking handy when they're kicking in doors, guarding each others' weak sides. 

Don has never asked about the NSA op that led to Charlie's knife-scar and ribs broken so many times they look like they've been molded out of play-doh by a careless child. It is not a topic for them, same as Don's short-lived engagement. 

It's fine, they've never needed words to communicate anyway. 

When Charlie steps back from the target and sets his gun aside, Don moves forward, snakes his arms around his brother's waist. Charlie's just enough shorter than him that they fit together like interlocking puzzle pieces, and Don's not sure anymore where they belong in the bigger picture, right or wrong, water or sky, but the fit can't be denied. He sinks his teeth into the meat of Charlie's shoulder through his t-shirt and Charlie sighs, goes limp against him. 

They just stay like that for a while. Ever since they were little, Don has teased Charlie for his self-absorption- _'The whole universe doesn't revolve around you, Chuck-'_ but the truth is, Charlie is the fulcrum around which _Don's_ world, at least, spins; the center. Everything is fast and dizzying on the edges, but here with Charlie he can be still, rest. Find peace. 

"So," he says at last. "New boss." 

"Mmm." 

"You don't like her," Don prompts. 

"I don't like shrinks," Charlie corrects. "Generally. They're nosy." 

"Reeves is a profiler-" 

"Who called around about me until my handler at the NSA got wind of it." Charlie's lip pooches out a little in displeasure; not quite a pout, not quite a scowl. "And she looks at me like a specimen in a jar. I'm not a _science project."_

"I know, buddy." Don shifts a little, tangles his fingers with Charlie's and brings both their hands up to his brother's chest, squeezes him tightly, until he squeaks, and then lets go, steps away. 

When Granger comes in the door, Charlie is reloading, hands perfectly steady, and Don is firing at the paper target, shots neatly clustered at center of mass. Calm. Ordinary. 

They've been lying to everyone for so long they don't even need words to tell them anymore. 

* * *

It's reasonable to assume that any differences can be attributed to their mother's death. It's almost textbook, in fact. _Problems relating to others and forming long-term relationships. Alcohol or substance abuse. Difficulty detaching from the living parent._

No long-term romantic partners or friends outside of work. They drink, some would say heavily. And they both live with Alan, in the very same house where Margaret was murdered. 

_Check, check, check._

And it's not unusual for LEOs to be driven to pick up the badge by the experience of a violent crime, either personally or through a loved one. 

_Check._

But something about it fits so _perfectly_ that it doesn't fit. 

She doesn't think they're faking it. Not exactly. More as though they're using the expected reactions to conceal something else. 

Megan sighs. _Or maybe I'm just being paranoid because I still can't figure them out._

With a grim smile, she muses, _Or both. Charlie would tell me not to get sucked into the trap of binary thinking._

* * *

David will always harbor the tiniest bit of guilt for thinking, on first meeting him, that Charlie was a young, sheltered academic and had no business being in the field. 

Because not three days later, he watched as Dr. Charles Edward Eppes grabbed a serial bomber by the hair and forced him to his knees, and explained that there were seventeen rounds in his magazine, and listed, in order, which part of the body he would target, explained the physics of what that small projectile would do to flesh and bone at close range, in order to inflict maximum damage with minimum blood loss so that the perp would still be able to confess when he was done screaming. He said it with all the emotion of someone reciting a grocery list. 

It was cold, precise, utterly terrifying, and it _worked._ The perp had targeted a children's hospital, and he told them exactly where the bombs were located and how to disarm them. 

Much later, the guy's defense attorney tried to get the whole case thrown out for excessive force, and Charlie flashed an NSA ID and a smile like the glint of a knife-edge and dared the man to put him on the stand. 

(The serial bomber was quietly advised by his counsel to take the deal for 15-to-life and be grateful.) 

Now, over the years David's worked with Charlie, they've become something like friends. He trusts the guy to have his six and completely believes in the power of his math. But he never forgets his first impression and how it was completely, hilariously wrong. 

He never forgets the lesson that the person you dismiss on sight might turn out to be the most dangerous one in the room. 

* * *

Alan worries sometimes. 

He worries about all kinds of things; if the house will make it through another earthquake, his cholesterol, the loss of individual freedom after 9/11, whether his sons are irreparably damaged and how much of that is his fault. 

After Margaret...after. When Charlie came home from the hospital, they all talked about moving. Alan wasn't in favor of abandoning a place that held a decade of good memories to avoid one bad one, especially since it was something that would haunt their dreams and define their lives even if they moved to Timbuktu; but he would have done it, done anything for his boys. 

Don was ambivalent. He didn't want to leave his friends, and he hadn't actually seen anything that day, but he was at the age where death was starting to seem creepy, becoming more than just an abstract concept, and living in a house where Someone Had Died was disturbing even without the context particular to their situation. 

Charlie didn't want to leave, in fact had a panic attack at the suggestion of moving. Alan understands why now, that it has, in fact, very little to do with the how and why of Margaret's death - _characterized by an inability to cope with changes in environment or routine -_ but that doesn't mean he doesn't wonder, often, if they should have stayed. 

Charlie had nightmares every night for years, and he'd already been going to his big brother with every joy and sorrow since he was a toddler. Don had started to pull away, wanting independence, but after Margaret died he clung just as tight, was determined to stand between Charlie and the world. Every night, Alan would tuck his boys in, each in their own beds; and every morning when he woke them for school, he would find Charlie in Don's bed, curled in a ball, clutching his pillow to his chest, and Don sprawled at his back, one arm draped over Charlie protectively, cheek smashed against his brother's curls. 

He thought they'd grown out of it. Once Charlie got into his teens he was more likely to fall asleep in his papasan chair in the garage after working on a problem, and then they went to college; Charlie to MIT, Don to Hills College in Boston, despite getting sports scholarship offers from both UCLA and UNM. 

"Chuck needs someone to keep an eye on him, make sure he remembers to eat and occasionally talks to people who aren't math geeks," Don had said fondly, and that was that. MIT paid for their shared apartment. 

Something happened just before Don's junior year that left each of his sons tense and silent at the mention of the other. Don transferred from Hills to UNM Las Cruces to finish his degree, Charlie moved into the dorms at MIT. 

Charlie went to Princeton for his second doctorate and a chance to have Larry Fleinhardt as his thesis advisor. Don went into the minor leagues and got engaged to a patissier named Kelsey. 

Charlie got involved in something so black-ops that to this day Alan doesn't even know which three-letter agency is responsible for the knife-scar on his jaw and throat (the remnants of an unsucessful Columbian necktie) and a hospital stay that trumped even the 27-day-bender when he witnessed Margaret's murder at age six. 

Don dropped baseball and Kelsey and went into the FBI, and Alan still suspects that it had less to do with wanting to catch killers the way no one had caught his mother's murderer (as Don claimed), and more to do with keeping Charlie safe. 

When Don was assigned to the LA Field Office, they both moved back home, and Alan told them that even if they were apparently incapable of leaving the nest, they were old enough to buy alarm clocks and get themselves up in the mornings. Really, he just preferred the occasional sleepless night turning worries over in his mind like smooth-worn beach glass in a fidgeting hand, to knowing; to knocking on his youngest son's door in the mornings, pushing it open and finding the bed empty. 

* * *

Amita had a huge crush on Charlie when she first came to Cal-Sci. 

Full on, hearts-in-eyes, daydreams of wedding bells and fat-cheeked genius babies _crush._ He's so brilliant, and so charismatic and passionate talking about math, and the big brown bedroom eyes and raspy velvet-over-gravel voice don't hurt at all. 

He's still all of those things. But one day about two months into her first semester in the doctoral program, and as his TA, he came rushing in for one of his graduate seminars almost five minutes late, missing the zip-front thin cotton hoodie he always wears (he has the same one in nine different colors and there's clearly a pattern to which one he wears on a given day, but Amita hasn't worked out the equation yet) with his curls sleeked back from his face with an elastic at his nape. As he walked in, he was pulling off a bulletproof vest to reveal a t-shirt that declared, _I don't teach math for a living; I do it for fun!_ He had dirt on the knees of his jeans, along with what looked like blood spatter on his thighs, arms and faintly on his face. He was wearing black boots with thick treads crusted with mud, instead of his usual Converse. He smelled like something sharp and chemical that Amita later learned was cordite. And he was wearing a gun holstered at the small of his back. 

He had immediately launched into his lecture, and when he turned to write on the whiteboard, his grad students didn't even react to the fact that he was armed. Like it was normal. 

And Amita realized it probably was. Those hoodies he wore even on the most sweltering of California late-summer days, were hiding that he wore a _gun._ Every time Amita flirted with him, when they stayed late in his office marking papers, he was _armed._ Because his 'consultant work for the FBI' that she'd thought was forensic accounting or maybe geographic profiling or something done in an office was clearly _nothing like what she thought at all._

Because _Charlie_ was nothing like what she thought, at all. 

And so Amita stopped flirting, and stopped daydreaming, and stopped wishing. And they're friends now, a bit. And he's a great advisor to have, because he's so excited, _genuinely_ excited, without being resentful or patronizing, about her potential and her ideas and her work. 

Working for Charlie is great, and she wouldn't trade it. Even though he scares the crap out of her. 

* * *

Colby isn't stupid. 

And what he is, particularly, is observant. It's why he was recruited for CID and later for the FBI. He's good at noting details and filing them away until they're useful, or he has a collection of enough related details to make a bigger picture. 

And unlike David, who only has sisters, and Megan, who's an only child, Colby has brothers. Heaps of them. Seven siblings, only one of them female, and Colby is right in the middle; and on top of that, cousins by the dozens. He's seen every type of sibling relationship from 'fight like two feral cats in a sack' to 'I love you and all, but are you an alien?' to close-as-twins to _actual_ twins. 

If one of Colby's older brothers ever looked at him the way Don looks at Charlie, Colby's daddy would have been reaching for the shotgun. 

The thing that stays Colby's tongue – other than the fact that it's no crime to have _thoughts,_ however disturbing they may be – is that Charlie looks back at Don the same way. 

He broods on it for a while. Is he willing to ruin two lives over something he's not sure is actually happening? And if it _is_....is between two adults, with no signs of manipulation or coercion, far less outright force. 

And when those particular two adults are so much a part of solving cases and getting justice and closure for victims who need it. Finding spree and serial offenders faster, before they can hurt more people. And yeah, there are other investigators out there as good as Don is – he's driven and skilled and highly competent but, fortunately for the Bureau, not unique – but Colby's never known anybody who can put things together like Charlie can. Maybe there _is_ nobody, at least not in law enforcement, because people who can do what Charlie does are making money hand over fist working for big tech companies, or doing data analysis for the NSA, or climbing to the top of the ivory tower at a major university. Or, some of them, probably, are staring slack-jawed at the walls in a mental institution. Not frantically paging through crime scene photos at three in the morning looking for just the right bit of evidence to spark that eureka moment, or clearing a perp's house in full tac gear. 

Ruin two lives, _and_ all the lives of all the people Charlie could have helped or saved? On a maybe? 

No. He won't do it. And more than that, he decides to stop looking for more details, for reasons to change his mind. Reminds himself that Don and Charlie are both adults, and their personal choices are none of his damn business. Reminds himself that, of the two of them, if anyone is the boss it's _obviously_ Charlie, so it's not even a case of a naive younger sibling being taken advantage of. 

Probably. 

Hopefully. 

Doesn't matter. Not a certain thing, not his business, not looking, not speaking of it, nothing to see here, move along. 

And if the decision to bury his head in the sand makes him feel like a bit of a fraud every time he puts on his badge, well. Colby's not in a hurry to tell anyone _that,_ either. 

* * *

Larry and Charles have the dubious honour of sharing an NSA handler. This means that when Charles was unable to meet his dissertation deadline for his second doctorate, due to being in a medically induced coma in a hospital on Isla De Tenerife, Larry was the first to find out. 

(Larry still doesn't know where Charles _was,_ exactly, other than 'somewhere in Africa,' or whether he was kidnapped and retrieved or already on the continent for an op and ran into trouble. He knows better than to ask.) 

When they arrived back on US soil, a handsome man with gravity-defying short dark hair, wearing jeans and a sweater, met their flight. He had tears in his eyes when he put his arms around Charles so carefully, it was like watching somebody try to catch a soap bubble without popping it. 

Charles wasn't having any of that, grabbed a fistful of the man's sweater, yanked his head down, and kissed him like the world was ending. 

After he defended his doctoral thesis, having been refused a longer extension and still hardly able to speak above a whisper, with delicate black stitches holding together his still-healing throat, Charles turned down Princeton's employment offer with extreme prejudice and accepted one from Georgetown. He told anyone there who asked that he'd been in a terrible car accident, and cut with sheared metal from the hood of the other car. 

Larry made the trip down from New Jersey to visit at least bi-monthly, grad students permitting, and only twice did his visits overlap with those of Charles' nameless lover, though there was clear evidence of another person living in the apartment at least part-time. Charles never introduced him, and always addressed him as 'hon' or 'babe' when Larry was in earshot. The man was permitted to use the appelate 'Chuck' without the verbal flaying Marshall Penfield had received for the attempt. 

When Larry asked after him on other occasions, he always said, “How is your young man, Charles?” 

And he would get a soft, secret smile on his face and say, “He's good. We both are.” 

And really, that was everything Larry wanted for his friend, particularly in the wake of the Africa op, and all he needed to know. 

Years later, when Larry tires of his battles with Princeton's Dean of Physics and the ordeal of New Jersey winters and follows Charles to Cal-Sci, a still-grieving Alan Eppes introduces Larry to “my oldest son, Donnie,” and says, “Charlie must have talked about him all the time. They were always close, my boys.” 

And Larry is able to master his shock, decades-old training coming to the fore, an ability to conceal and prevaricate that he'd thought himself done with after the end of the Cold War, and only gently corrects Alan, “Charles didn't speak of him often, actually, but when he did it was always good.” 

It is, after all, the truth. 

* * *

Charlie kisses like all the dirtiest wet dreams Don's ever had, and it might be innate talent, but he wasn't like this when they were greedy, fumbling adolescents who'd never fucked anyone but each other. It's something else from their years apart, probably someone _taught_ Charlie to kiss like this, and Don alternates between wanting to send that person flowers and wanting to bury their dismembered body in the desert. 

His voice has changed, too. It was still crackling intermittently at fifteen, and now it's deep and raspy. When Don is turned on he feels it almost as a physical touch, like being licked with a rough tongue. 

Tenerife marks so many changes in Don's life, the Anno Domini of his personal history. Part of the reason Don has never asked what put him in that hospital is because Charlie would tell him, NDAs be damned. And Don does not want details. The most awful thing that has ever happened to Charlie was the catalyst for everything good in Don's life; his career with the FBI, Charlie back, taking the jump to have as much of a real relationship as possible with the constraints of secrecy, rather than treating it as something to be ashamed of. 

When it's been ten years since Tenerife, right down to the day, standing in that airport arrivals lounge in Newark on the Ides of March and watching Charlie walk toward him grey and thin and stitched up and the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen... 

Don tells him. His Bureau-assigned psychiatrist has been on his ass about being honest, which, ha. Not gonna happen. But he can be honest with _Charlie,_ who half the time knows what he's thinking before he says it anyway. Swipes one fingertip over the jagged scar from jaw-hinge to collarbone and says, “I hate this scar. I hate what it means. I hate that the worst thing to ever happen to you was the best thing to ever happen to me, because I got _you_ and the Bureau and the place where we _fit.”_

Charlie is smiling and shaking his head like Don has failed to grasp a basic mathematical theory. The 'you're so dumb that it's cute' smile. Don hasn't actually seen it since high school, because in his first semester at Hills he took _statistics,_ and they both learned that while not in Charlie's league, Don was actually no slouch at math when it was _really_ applied, taken completely out of the theoretical and estoeric and put to work as census data and batting averages. Crime demographics by neighbourhood. Things he wanted to _know,_ rather than math for math's sake. 

Anyway. The 'cute dumb puppy' smile. Not the reaction he expected when confessing that he's _glad_ his lover, his brother, his partner of the past decade, was tortured and almost killed. 

“The worst thing ever to happen to me was when you told me we were sick and wrong and took a transfer to UNM and we didn't talk for five years,” Charlie says, and completely flips his worldview upside-down. 

And then Charlie tells him about the op in Sierra Leone. Being interrogated and left for dead. The extraction. Pins in his ribs. Physiotherapy after a month in a coma. Feeling like he was strangling on every breath he took. 

And Don presses humbled, grateful kisses to each knobbled rib and along the length of that hated scar, because Charlie is not telling him to punish him. Charlie is telling him, _this is how much I love you. That losing you was worse. That I suffered this and was grateful because it gave you back to me._

“I'm sorry,” he whispers. “I'm sorry I ran, I'm sorry I pushed you away, I'm sorry I said we were sick and wrong.” 

“Don. I forgive you,” Charlie tells him. No brushing it off, or saying it didn't matter. It did and they both know it. It almost broke them. “But that was it, that's your one tantrum over us, that's all you get. No one's ever going to understand or think it's healthy, we'll always have to keep it a secret. That won't change. But I swear by the math if you try to leave me again I will kneecap you before you get five yards.” 

And Don laughs and kisses him until he has to stop kissing to laugh and stop laughing to kiss, because _that_ is the man he loves. Offering grace and forgiveness with one hand and vengeance and death with the other, a threat that might as well be a marriage proposal, and he wouldn't have it any other way. 

* * *

So I was re-reading [Whitman,](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1235) as you do, and was struck by this particular passage from 'A Woman Waits For Me.'

_Colby let out a puff of air. “I saw Special Agent Charles Eppes. It was like I was looking into another dimension and there he was and he scared me.”_

_Charlie laughed. “Come on. I would be a disgrace of an FBI agent.”_

_Colby shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t. That’s the thing. You’re so damn smart, Charlie, and so very good at damn near anything you put your hand to, and when you were on the range today you got this focus, a lot like Don, really, and I could see you as clearly as anything, I could see you with a sniper rifle, I could see you in TAC gear, I could see you as a team lead, I could see you kicking in doors, interrogating suspects and it just fucking scared me.”_

And I thought, 'I would quite like to see that. Someone should write it.' And then I thought, 'Oh! I'm someone!' So this very much darker and more violent Charlie, as well as Larry having a ~past with the NSA, owe all thanks and praise to ladygray99, if, you know, she _wants_ to claim any association with this hot mess. 


End file.
